Parker - The Deficiency

For those of you who don't know, I bought a car about six months ago. His name is Parker, he's a great little vehicle. (For more on Parker, click here). However, recently Parker and I have experienced some deficiencies and blow-outs in our relationship.

The first was back in January. On my way back from the airport Parker's oil light came on. I had heard horror stories about driving without oil so I called my parents in a panic and was told to go to a has station and get some oil, as though this was the most obvious solution in the world. I was not enthused. For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to make enough money to ensure that I wouldn't have to know about cars. I have fluxuated in my desires to be wealthy, but I have always wanted to have enough to pay other people to take car of all car-related issues.

Unfortunately, I couldn't buy my way out of this particular situation. I pulled into a Chevron station in Salt Lake and, after gathering myself, went in to buy some oil. I went to the section of oil, and to my chagrin, there were about a dozen different kinds. I figured that I had a simple car (Parker is a Honda Accord) so I could just get the simplest/cheapest kind of oil. As I was paying for the oil, I worked up my courage and asked the boy (he could not have been more than 18) if he knew anything about putting oil in cars. He said he didn't, but that his co-worker (can't remember his name but I think it was something like Ralph) definitely did. He pointed to the bathroom and indicated that he would be out in a minute.

So, apparently this whole idea of fixing my own car had flustered me to the point of losing my sense of social decency. For some reason I thought it would be a great idea to go over and wait outside the bathroom for Ralph to come out. He was a little surprised by my close proximity to the door, apparently I was so close that he thought I was just confused about the little standing man icon on the door and said, "This is actually the men's room." After I sorted out that confusion and explained my awkwardness he was very nice and followed me out to my car. I went to put my wallet down in my car and he said, "Can you pop the hood?" I said, "Sure, is it stuck or something?" and promptly went to the front of the car and tried to help him lift it up. He said, "Oh uh...I just meant could you hit the button to pop the hood..."

I walked back to the front seat to attempt to find the hood-popping button, all the while feeling like a complete moron who stalked people while they were in the bathroom and assumed that a 30+ year-old man would need MY help because he wasn't strong enough to lift up the hood of a car. Oy! Thankfully Ralph was very patient and after two minutes of me pressing the trunk button, the gas tank button, and pulling some plastic piece off the inside of my car, we finally got the hood up.

Not only did Ralph help me put oil in my car, he took real interest in me and tried to educate me so that in the future, I would be a little more self-sufficient. He asked me if I knew how to check the level of oil in my car, I said, "Oh, my car has a light that tells me when it's low." He didn't even roll his eyes when he said, "Right, but we need to know how much you have so we know how much to put in. So you pull out your dipstick and check...." I'm afraid I didn't hear the rest of what he said because I was using all of my powers of concentration to keep from laughing. I was unsuccessful. On his second use of the word 'dipstick' I giggled uncontrollably. He laughed and just said, "I think one quart of oil will do fine. Do you have a funnel?"

I stared blankly back and he said, "We have them inside, they're free, you can just go ask for one." The rest of the process went fairly smoothly. He got me a different bottle of oil, because apparently just assuming that simple/cheap cars get simple/cheap oil is incorrect. He poured it in, threw away the empty container and used funnel, and asked me if there was anything else I needed. I almost made it out with a very enthusiastic, but graceful expression of gratitude. But not quite.

When he was about to go inside I asked one last stupid question, "Should I turn it on to make sure it works?" He said, "Uh..sure." I turned the car on while he watched and after seeing the dashboard I said, "I think we must need more, the light is still on. Should I go get another bottle, or should we do two just to be safe?" He then explained to me that the light was just not reset, and all I had to do was to check the owner's manual to see how to reset the light. I thanked him again and went on my merry way. I felt bad for not doing something for him. But do you tip a friendly gas station attendant? I'm not very savvy about tipping protocol. But I didn't want to risk insulting him, especially since I only had one dollar....

Stay tuned for upcoming posts 'Parker and I Seek Help from a Mechanic" and "The Big Blowout".

Alcohol from the Outside

I am a non-drinker and a completely uneducated observer of alcohol culture. I've grown up in Utah my whole life, with family that doesn't drink and friends that don't drink. But I've recently become semi-acquainted with this culture, at least enough that I have some observations about it that I would like to throw out there, and be corrected by those who know better.

I have three categories, because they're the only ones I really know. I realize there are others, but my observations of their consumption have been rare to non-existent. So I here I discuss Tequila, Beer, and Wine.

Tequila - My undestanding of Tequila is that it is consumed in shots, is sort of a south-of-the-border drink (ie: mostly from Mexico?), and is usually ideal for situations when the people want to become uninhibited, and quickly.

Beer - I realize the sphere of beer is probably too large to be summed up under just the heading 'beer' but I wouldn't know how to narrow it down beyond the types I've seen on clever TV commercials (ie: light, frost-brewed, Coors, Budweiser, etc.). My impression of beer is that it has a bad reputation for being the lay-person's drink, or only for middle-aged men with large stomachs watching football. But I think it can be much more sophisticated than that, titles like 'pale ale' do not say unsophisticated slob to me. I've come to think of beer as an extremely general term used to describe alcoholic drinks not made from grapes and somehow involving wheat or this mysterious thing called 'hops' which I cannot seem to understand. My impression of beer now is that it is ideal for people at bars because they can drink several without feeling too intoxicated, they're not to expensive, and because beer is the most social drink, and what more social place is there than a bar? I also think beer is a good choice for a casual lunch at a sit-down restaurant, where you might order a cheeseburger but a waiter would serve it and it would come with some sort of gourmet fries or the option of getting a salad. 

Wine - Again, I realize there are so many kinds of wine that an attempt to describe it and its use cases is probably silly, but I have just enough gaps in my knowledge to feel like I can pull this off. Wine is for those who appreciate food, and in some cases aesthetics. It is also a social-aloofness drink, where beer is the "I'm here to party with y'all" drink, wine is the "I'm here to enjoy conversations with people I deem worthy" drink. There is red wine, white wine, bottled wine, boxed wine, and the interesting thing is that each type has some sort of social stigma attached to it, or at least expectations of how it should be used. So I think wine is as much about image or status (demonstrating sophistication by pairing the right wine with the right food, or defying social norms by drinking boxed wine instead of bottled) as it is about enjoyment.

So there's what I think/know about alcohol? Am I way off? Am I close? Anybody who has an opinion, educated or not, I'd love to hear what you think.

PS - I'd like to give a small shout-out to my friends at work who have provided me with most of my education on this subject, both purposefully and inadvertently :)

Brand Conversion

So I'm watching the Olympics the other night and this Nissan commercial comes on. I typically find car commercials occasionally entertaining but completely uncompelling. But as the next commercials continued I found myself thinking more and more about the Nissan tagline "Shift the way you move through the world." The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I was impressed. I didn't want to go buy a car, and I felt no particular interest in their cars, but I loved that tagline.

And then a Coke commercial came on. It was not extremely clever, and had no tagline, but I was compelled by it. Nothing sounded better to me in that moment than an ice-cold bottle of Coke. All I wanted to do was hold that bottle, remove the cap and hear that refreshing pop/hiss sound, tilt my head back and pour some down my throat.

The contrast of these two commercials got me thinking about brand images and what I call brand conversion, and it reminded me something from a class I'm taking. So we're making our way through St. Augustine's 'Confessions', and we continue to see him switching idealogies, from Manichiesm to Skepticism to Platonism etc. His continuous conversions however, are clearly not complete, or at least not lasting. He moves through all of these systems of belief in a matter of a few years. So I kept wondering, what is it that finally makes Christianity stick for him?  Well, I think Christianity was his Coke, whereas the Philosophical idealogies were his Nissan.

I had an intellectual connection with Nissan as a result of their commercial. The problem was, it had no motivating power. I had an emotional connection with Coke.  Emotional conversions motivate and compel people to act in a way intellectual conversions never do. In Augustine's case, his emotional conversion to Christianity motivated him to finally give up his all-consuming sexual escapades.

Now there may be something more to the Coke vs. Nissan problem, it is entirely possible that the difference in the purchasing process between a car and a drink has something to do with the intellectual vs. emotional marketing.

But here's what I know: Coke's got me. I count myself among the devout.

Valentine's Day: Part II

In the last post I explained why I have always detested Valentine's Day, but here's why and how I've re-thought my position:

A few weeks ago I heard someone suggest that rather than having one day a year to celebrate love, we should have one day a year to celebrate hate, or at least to liberate ourselves from the oppression of that ugly emotion. I laughed at first, but upon further thought I decided that the idea of making hate the one-day exception, and love the rule was not such a bad idea after all. Unfortunately, I am not so optimistic as to believe that is possible. I do not think love is the default in the settings of human emotions.

I think we need a day focused on love and I am determined to take advantage of the opportunity this holiday provides. After the attitude of benevolence which so pervades the Christmas season, wears off and we all settle in to wait out the doldrums of winter, we need Valentine's Day to shake us out of our selfish hibernation.

I am going to to credit my Philosophy class with opening my eyes to the possiblities here. In my St. Augustine class we've been talking about how love is one of the greatest goods, however, when directed toward the wrong things/people it loses its value. We've discussed the various types of love, unfortunately Augustine had a little problem with focusing his love, a lustful type of love, on women, multiple women, hence his famous line 'give me chastity, but not yet'. (If he looks confused, it's because he clearly was.)

His 'love' was slightly misguided and I see Valentine's Day as perpetuating a similar problem. Valentine's Day focuses too narrowly on one kind of love. So what have I decided to do? I'm expanding my Valentine's Day horizons. From this point forward, the day of love is no longer just a holiday about receiving flowers or chocolates from anything male that speaks, but about love in all it's forms. I'm evolving my Valentine's-Day-love-thoughts from the narrowness of the Supremes to the broader ideals of the Beatles.

I am going to take this Valentine's Day as a positive opportunity to express how I feel to people who matter to me and to show love to people who need it. I will not be making a blanket statement of love to anyone who reads this post, but I look forward to this Valentine's Day as an opportunty for growth and an opportunity to avoid the bitterness associated with the day also known as Singles' Awareness Day.

Valentine's Day: Part I

It's February, and besides all the excitement associated with President's Day, Valentine's Day is just around the corner. I have very strong feelings about this holiday, and in the past they have been nothing but negative. However, in a riveting two-part post I will explain first what my past issues with February 14th have been, and then why I've come around to a more positive point of view.

This crazy holiday is such an easy target for criticism: the extreme over-commercialization, the insipid little candy hearts which completely mock the ideals of love, and the stress this holiday puts on casual relationships! Need I go on? I have long held that this holiday must be stopped! In the name of love!

For me this holiday is especially painful due to my issues with the word 'love'. I could very likely count on one hand the number of people I have said the 'L' word to, and I don't mean just romantically, I mean at all. Most attempts to verbalize the words to other humans result in a sudden hot flash, accompanied by a restricted airway-type feeling. This makes things difficult around Valentine's Day when it is IMPOSSIBLE to escape the 'L' word. However I like to think that this physiological abnormality is not so much a result of my being emotionally stunted, but rather a safety mechanism of sorts which helps me understand and preserve the real meaning of the word 'love'.

I've always thought of valentines day as representing the worst of and even mocking love. It debases love, and turns it into a commercial commodity. Something that is to be bought with roses and chocolates, or expressed to people we may not even like with little candy hearts.

Is this what love is? No. But this seems to be what Valentine's Day is about. It takes the most complicated emotions and attempts to contain all the complexity in one icky little symbol, the heart. Not only that but the perpetuators of Valentine's Day attempt to sell this symbol in every possible form: chocolate hearts, gummy hearts, heart balloons, stuffed hearts, heart-shaped cards, lace hearts, cases of soda in the shape of hearts, heart shaped flowers, and more!

I realize that some of you who enjoy Valentine's Day will write my opinions off as those of a bitter single person, and I may be both bitter and single. However, no matter what my Facebook relationship status may say, I doubt that a day full of chocolate and giant, pink, heart pillows will ever be a day I can enjoy.

Coming soon: How I've Decided to Cope with, and Even Make the Most of February 14th

A Little Italiano...

So normally this blog is all about me. That's what I know, that's what I like, and that's the way it is. However, recent amusing occurrences in the life of my brother, and his surprisingly decent written communication skills, made me decide to include an update of his life here. Some of you know William, Anziano West as he is currently known, some of you may not but I think you will all find this updated entertaining.

To catch you up, William is an LDS missionary in Italy. He spent three months in the Provo Missionary Training Center and has now been in Italy for almost four months. This first snippet is from his stay in the MTC and highlights some of the difficulties in trying to learn a new language in three months:

Over the course of the week we've also had a few other funny mistakes. In practicing food vocab i tried asking for a "head of lettice" which is Testa di Lattuga in Italian. However, i said "tetta di lattuga" which, it turns out means a nipple of lettice. Can you imagine the look on my teachers face? It was a good 5 minutes before we could continue. it was very funny. We also found out that we had been teaching all week in our practice lessons that Jesus Christ was "deep fried" for our sins. The word for suffered is Sofferto. We used Sofritto. I'm just glad that i didn't make that mistake in sacrament meeting in Milan. Oh man...

This next bit is from a church experience he had in early December:

I failed to plink out the first few notes on the piano for the opening hymn, then president announced that one of the sisters would be giving a talk (having completely forgotten to inform her earlier). She then gave a quick testimony on how she had seen that the downtown Ancona Nativity scene was missing the baby Jesus, and how she had born testimony to a beggar right there about how we don't need to steal Jesus to have him in our lives, but how we can have him in our lives through following the word of wisdom. My companion was translating for her (she is nigerian and speaks english) and he was dying - trying not to laugh and figure out how to translate "stealing Jesus" at the same time. Very funny.

For those of you who get William's emails, you wouldn't have heard this next one. He wrote this one in a letter to me, and asked that I not tell our mother so if any of you talk to her, DON'T tell her this story:

So we were doing house to house tracting in some student housing. We got in at one apartment with two Albanian students (one named Blendi, he told us he was named after the English word 'blend', the other was pretty much all consonants, Zlithr or something that will never be pronounced right by an English speaker). So these two guys seemed super tired - moving slowly, talking slowly - they just seemed exhausted. We just assumed it was because they'd had a long week at school. So we started teaching the lesson, and pretty soon we started getting tired too. I couldn't pay attention to what my companion was saying, and from the way he kept pausing and looking around the apartment, neither could he. At first I assumed it was because we had also had a long week, or because the TV was on. Then I noticed a jar on the table full of what looked like sugar. There were also lighters and a spoon that had clearly been used to melt the 'sugar'. We had walked in on these guys doing drugs! Needless to say we got out of there as soon as we could. We definitel got a piece of whatever that was - our brains were way fuzzy and we just had to give up halfway through the next lesson and leave because we couldn't think. Who would have thought the word of wisdom would be so hard to live as a missionary.

And the last story, maybe the best, comes from his letter this last week:

Monday morning, we had gotten up early to catch the 6:30 train to get to interviews. We had just gotten on the train and i had just opened the Book of Mormon to start off the 3 hour journey when the man across the isle started gasping for air. He was at lest mid 70's, and minutes before had seemed fine - complaining a bit because of the cold train car. But now he was fighting to breathe and his wife (also in her 70?s) was starting to panick. We came over to see if there was anything we could do, and i'm not going to lie, i was freaked out. I knew that somewhere in my mind was all sorts of stuff about what to do in all sorts of different situations like this. However i was well aware that it had been 6 years since i had really been trained as a lifeguard, and 3 since i had practiced CPR. I didn't remember a thing! But the guy was getting worse. His breathing slowed and then stopped and he started turning a really nasty green. And nobody was doing anything. So i had people help me lift him onto the floor (my italian completely failed me, and with a mix of hand motions and my companion's translations we got him situated on the floor). I was still in denial at this point. I couldn't give CPR. I was not qualified. I didn't remember anything at all. I would probably just cause more problems. with all that going through my head i grabbed his wrist and tried to find a pulse. There was nothing there. Suddenly this was all very real. This man was dead if i didn't do something right now. So the next thing i knew... i was giving CPR. Its fascinating how when in doubt you just flip back to the super basics. all i remembered was the stuff i learned from the first time i learned it - 1 breath, 15 compressions... i realized that i was doing it that way, i didn't plan to do it that way, it just happened. Then after a few repititions, a girl on the other side told me to just to 5 compressions - i, being freaked out and well aware that my skills were quite rusty, just assumed that she knew better and told her to do the compressions while i did breaths (nope, she didn't know what to do, but it hey, cpr was happening so i just kept breathing). So between the two of us we gave CPR until someone else took over after a few minutes. It was terrifying. After the other guy took over (he certainly was no pro, but still cpr was happening which was about as much as we could ask for) i just tried to comfort the poor wife, who had been standing behind us the whole time watching (can you imagine?) I just tried to calm her down, had her sit, tried to comfort her (i didn't do much. the language part of my brain had long since shut off.) So the results: During the ameteur CPR the man started breathing twice, but since his heart didn't start back up it didn't last long. The train stopped at the next stop (miraculously this station was right by the huge regional hospital) and the ambulence arrived and we were told to wait outside the train. For about 15-20 really freaky minutes we sat and waited and prayed that everything would work out. It didn't look good. we saw a defibrilator (the classic electric shock heart starter) go in, we watched the paramedics jog back and forth from the ambulence. I felt terrible for my sorry excuse for CPR, thinking how i could have acted faster and bolder, etc... Finally they carried him out of the train, and in a wonderful moment we watched them pumping the breather bag (that means he isn't dead), and then watched him moving around. And in that final rush of emotion and adrenaline, finally knowing that this guy was alive, my companioned turned to me and said, "ok, now i'm going to say it. That is the only lip service you are going to get for the next two years!" What would i do without such a great companion? In that moment i could finally relax, laugh, and stop worrying about my performance. 5 minutes later we were back on the train (we got to ride first class because the paramedics left all sorts of stuff in the other train car) and the day just wen't on as if nothing had happened. We even got to talk to a few peolpe about the gospel because of it. And who knows, maybe they will remember the terrified missionary on the train the next time the missionaries knock at the door.

So there you go, some experiences from my Italian missionary brother. I know everyone says missions are really hard but it sounds like he's living the life! All of his letters are entertaining, he gets fed a TON of amazing Italian food (he's already gained 11 pounds), and he's living in Italy! What more could you want?

Central Park Squirrels

I spend last Saturday morning in one of my favorite places in this whole world, Central Park. I always enjoy walking through the park because I always get something out of it. Sometimes I get great pictures, sometimes it's great people watching, sometimes it's a great New York hot dog. This time, I saw some fascinating people, ate a great hot dog, and learned something about squirrels.

The Central Park Squirrels have been conditioned to put up with, even seek out our genus because they trust in our beneficence, but even more in our constant supply of food. Their pause in our presence is no longer a result of fear, but of contemplation, is this person worthy of my presence? Do they have enough food to make this exchange worth my time?

This sizing up is not so unlike us in the way we treat each other. Animals we treat with equal openness or closed-mindedness. And for the most part the animals do the same, treating all humans with equal suspicion. But this discriminating aspect of human nature, this is what we've passed on to the Central Park squirrels. The squirrels are certainly less guilty for their judgments than we, their's comes from natural survival instincts, a search for food. We however, are guilty of shallow, hurtful discriminations.

Thankfully, I was apparently judged as one who is worthy although I prefer not to think about the factors that lead them to believe I had food to spare.